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Daniel Webster

The Willey Family Tragedy Starts White Mountain Tourism

When the Samuel Willey family moved to Crawford Notch in 1825, they unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that turned the White Mountains into a tourist attraction.

The mountains were a desolate wilderness in the decades after the American Revolution. Nonetheless, Willey took his wife, five children and two hired men to live in a small, remote house in the mountains. Called the Old Notch House, it had been built in 1793.

During his first year, Samuel Willey and his two hired hands expanded the house. It stood in the shadow of a mountain now called Mt. Willey.

The men turned it into an inn for travelers along the deserted notch road.

Willey Family Tragedy

In June 1826 a heavy rain terrified the Willey family when it caused a landslide across the Saco River. Sam Willey decided to build a stone shelter above the house. He thought the family could find safety there in case of another landslide.

On Aug. 28, 1826, a violent rainstorm caused a mudslide on the mountainside. The Willey family and the two hired men took refuge in the stone shelter. The landslide killed all nine of them, but it missed the house they’d fled. A ledge above the house spared it from destruction.

The Willey Family House

Rescuers found unmade beds, clothes strewn about and an open Bible on a table in the house, and they concluded the family had left in a panic. They found the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Willey, two of their daughters and the two hired hands. But they never found the bodies of the other three children.

News of the Willey family tragedy spread through newspapers and Theodore Dwight’s guidebook, The Northern Traveler. The intact Willey family house began to attract tourists. Then it began to attract artists and writers. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a short story about the Willey family tragedy, called The Ambitious Guest.

White Mountain Tourism

Others exploited the tragedy as well. A mountain guide named Ethan Crawford, who grew up in the notch, built an inn. He called it the Notch House, and his brother Thomas ran it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster and Henry David Thoreau stayed at the inn.

Eventually the Crawford family gave their name to the mountain pass, previously called the White Mountain Notch.

Samuel Willey’s brother, the Rev. Benjamin Willey, charged for guided tours of the Willey family house. In 1845, a tourism entrepreneur named Horace Fabyan turned the Willey house into a 50-room hotel.

John Frederick Kensett

Thomas Cole, member of the Hudson River School of painting, found inspiration in the Willey family tragedy. He painted a landscape called Distant View of the Slide that Destroyed the Willey Family. Other painters followed, and prints and paintings of the White Mountains drew more tourists to the region.

No painting did more for White Mountain tourism, though, than John Frederick Kensett’s Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway in 1851.

willey-family-kensett-painting-mount-washington

Mount Washington from the Valley of Conway

Kensett’s image became the single most effective mid-nineteenth-century advertisement for the scenic charms of the White Mountains and of North Conway in particular, wrote Barbara J. MacAdam as the Jonathan L. Cohen Curator of America Art at the Hood Museum of Dartmouth College.

An engraver made a copy of the painting, which was sold to 13,000 subscribers of the American Art Union. Artists copied the painting, and Currier & Ives turned the engraving into a lithograph in 1860. It surpassed images of the Willey family house as the best known landscape view of the era.

Kensett’s other landscape paintings achieved great popularity, partly because he painted newly fashionable resorts like Newport, R.I.

Another Tragedy

Born in Cheshire, Conn., Kensett followed his father into the engraving trade, but tired of it and turned to painting. He bought land on an island off Darien, Conn., and called it Contentment. In 1872 his own life ended in tragedy, when he jumped into the Long Island Sound to save the life of a friend’s wife. Not only did he fail to save her, he caught pneumonia and died a month later.

The Willey family house is now an interpretive center within Crawford Notch State Park.

This story about the Willey family was updated in 2022.

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Jefferson Davis in New England – The Unlikely Campaign

Mississippi Senator Jefferson Davis, who would go on to become president of the confederate states during the Civil War, was no stranger to New England.

A firebrand and die-hard defender of the south and all its traditions – including slavery – Davis twice traveled to New England in the 1850s. The first trip came in 1853. Davis visited the region in his official capacity as secretary of war under President Franklin Pierce to tour military installations.

Both trips were designed to escape the south’s summer heat, but Davis’ second visit was also to help him restore his health and perhaps steer the nation away from war.

Gracious Maine: Jefferson Davis in New England

Davis left Baltimore for Boston aboard a steamer on July 3, 1858. After an overnight stop in the city, he caught a second steamer to Portland.

His tour of Maine included a stop at the home of General Henry Knox in Thomaston, a trip to Lead Mountain and a stop in Belfast to review a state militia meeting. In Brunswick – once home of abolitionist author Harriet Beecher Stowe – he was honored with an honorary degree. And in Portland, he agreed to address the Cumberland County Democractic Convention.

Jefferson Davis

Davis was quite an attraction. The Republican press had vilified Davis and his extreme views as a man of the “ultra south.” Crowds in New England who came to see him might well have expected a raving tyrant. What they got was a smooth, elegant southern gentleman with impeccable manners and exotic green-tinted glasses to protect his eyes.

Davis was largely blind in one eye due to an persistent infection, which he hoped the moderate northern climate would help him ease.

At the Democratic Convention in Portland, he sounded a note of conciliation. Were the differences between north and south really so great as to demand a war;

“Shall narrow interests, shall local jealousies, shall disregard for the high purposes for which our union was ordained, continue to distract our people and impede the progress of our government towards the high consummation which prophetic statesmen have so often indicated as her destiny?”

“No, No, No,” the crowd thundered in reply.

Boston Wowed

As he began his return journey home in October, Davis stopped again in Massachusetts. He toured Daniel Webster’s Marshfield homestead.

Charles G. Greene, founder and editor of Boston Post, hosted a reception for Davis on Sat Oct. 16 and he socialized with prominent Massachusetts’ democrats, such as Caleb Cushing.

Republican Nathaniel Banks was governor of Massachusetts at the time of Davis’ visit. Banks was a moderate Republican who had won support of Massachusetts’ fervent abolitionists in part by firing Judge Edward Loring. Loring had enforced the Fugitive Slave Act, which required northern states to return escaped slaves to the south rather than grant them asylum.

On October 11, Davis addressed the state Democratic Convention held at Faneuil Hall to nominate Erasmus Beach to run for governor against Banks. (He would fail in the general election).

Again, Davis sounded his somewhat conciliatory tone. He defended slavery. And he called it an issue of state’s rights. (Though he didn’t extend the states’ rights argument to the right to grant asylum to escaped slaves.)

But he crafted a message designed as music to the ears of New Englanders wary of war. Was Massachusetts, home of John Hancock and Samuel Adams, really ready to discard all that the country had achieved over these regional disagreements?

Jefferson Davis, Peacemaker?

He sang the praises of John Hancock for snubbing President George Washington when the president visited the commonwealth in 1789. Hancock had asserted that the governor of each state should be of superior rank to the president in matters of protocol.

Davis reserved his harshest criticism for the abolitionists, painting them as bent on destroying the country. “The political agitator, like the vampire, fans the victim to which he clings but to destroy,” he said.

In summation, Davis said he hoped that those hoping to split the nation would not succeed.

“Why, then, I would ask, do we see these lengthened shadows, which follow in the course of our political day? Is it because the sun is declining to the horizon? Are they the shadows of evening; or are they, as I hopefully believe, but the mists which are exhaled by the sun as it rises, but which are to be dispersed by its meridian splendor?”

Davis, in his speeches, stressed that the differences between the south and north were not so great as to require a split. But he never said exactly what compromise he supported to avert it, leaving the listener to form his own conclusions.

Eruption in the South

In the north, moderates might well be persuaded that Davis’ position was softening, that he was suggesting an end to slavery might be acceptable for the preservation of the union. That interpretation was pleasing to some.

In the South, the Davis’ visit to New England was viewed as something like treason.

The Charleston Mercury in South Carolina declared Davis was a “Union Mormon.” It said “Jefferson Davis we know is no more.”

Davis needed to harden his rhetoric and in November of 1858, he did so. In a speech to the Mississippi legislature, he declared that the south must secede if an abolitionist were to be elected president.

“I love the flag of my country with even more than a filial affection,” he said. “I glory in the position which Mississippi’s star holds in the group; but sooner than see its lustre dimmed—sooner than see it degraded from its present equality—would tear it from its place to be set even on the perilous ridge of battle as a sign round which Mississippi’s best and bravest should gather to the harvest-home of death.”

This story about Jefferson Davis in New England was updated in 2023.

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Before Thanksgiving, December 22 Was Forefather’s Day

On one of the shortest days of the year, a group of Plymouth citizens continue a centuries-old tradition by celebrating Forefathers Day.

They rise before dawn, don top hats and march to the top of Cole’s Hill next to Massasoit’s statue. They listen to a reading of a proclamation honoring the forefathers, and they’ll fire an old cannon. Then they adjourn for a breakfast of succotash made the Pilgrims’ way: with broth and pieces of fowl.

forefathers-day-massasoit-statue-plymouth

Statue of Massasoit, a Pokanoket chief, in Plymouth

Before Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, people around the country celebrated Forefathers Day. They did it to honor the Pilgrims and the values they brought to the new country. Back before the Civil War, few people even knew about the Pilgrims’ big meal with Native Americans. In fact, they didn’t even call them Pilgrims.

But then Thanksgiving came along. The holiday shortened the sermons, improved the dinner fare and spread the mythology of the Pilgrim fathers eating in thankfulness with Massasoit and his tribe.

You could say, however, that Forefathers Day was Thanksgiving before there was a Thanksgiving.

The Pilgrims land.

Forefathers Day History

In 1769, seven Mayflower descendants formed the Old Colony Club to commemorate the day the Pilgrims landed. They ignored the Pilgrims’ landing in Provincetown or on Clark Island in Plymouth Harbor. They got the date wrong, too. The Pilgrims landed on December 21, but the mistake was attributed to the change to the Gregorian calendar.

The Old Colony Club had another reason for forming. They wanted to avoid intermixing with the hoi polloi in Plymouth’s taverns. The Club claimed Revolutionary War hero Alexander Scammell as a member.

Alexander Scammell

In a history of New England by Jedidiah Morse and Elijah Parish, they describe the early Forefathers Day as a religious festival. “After public worship, more forcibly to impress their minds with the circumstances of their meritorious forefathers, clams, fish, ground nuts, and victims from the forest, constitute a part of their grateful repast.”

But then came the Revolution, and the Old Colony Club split into Loyalists and Patriots. So they had to abandon Forefathers Day from 1776-1790.

When Forefathers Day resumed, Boston Federalists eagerly took it up to celebrate the traditions of old New England – including resistance to English tyranny.

They celebrated the first 50 or so years ignorant of many of the details about the Pilgrims’ ordeal. Mourt’s Relation went undiscovered until 1823 and Of Plymouth Plantation until 1853. That meant few people knew the story of the harvest festival with Massasoit – the ostensible first Thanksgiving.

That didn’t stop Daniel Webster from giving a two-hour speech about New England’s importance on Forefathers Day in 1819.

How Forefathers Day Spread

Forefathers Day was a day to march in parades, hold formal dinners and listen to sermons. (Perhaps that’s why it didn’t stick.) As late as 1890 and as far away as New York City, Dr. William Everett gave a Forefathers Day speech.

The members of the New England Society of New York adopted Forefathers Day in 1805. As New Englanders migrated west and south, expatriate New Englanders founded New England Clubs all over the country — in Charleston, August, New Orleans, Louisville, Detroit, Cincinnati, Springfield, Ill., and San Francisco.

The New England clubs did charitable work among the poor and socialized. Each adopted Dec. 22, Forefathers Day, to celebrate their New England heritage. Over and over again, they told the Pilgrim story.

Calling the Shots

Daniel Webster

Orations and sermons praised the Pilgrims for their tolerance, their reverence for law and for liberty, their commitment to public education and their religious faith. And as New England published most of the new nation’s history books before the Civil War, New England got to call the shots about what happened.

Virginia fought back and created its own Forefathers day. The Old Dominion commemorated Jamestown as “chosen ground.” But in 1802 at a Forefathers Day in Plymouth, celebrants gave a toast: “Our Sister Virginia:–When she changes three-fifths of her Ethiopian Skin, we will respect her as the head of our white family.”

But Forefathers Day began to fade away after the Civil War. Thanksgiving celebrants co-opted the Pilgrim story. By 1900 Forefathers Day had fallen into obscurity, everywhere but in Plymouth.

Plymouth

Only in Plymouth will people get up early four days before Christmas and march up a hill in the cold, wrote Old Colony Club member Richmond Talbot.

“Thanksgiving belongs to America, but Forefathers Day is ours alone,” he wrote. “Who but we would come out four days before Christmas to celebrate a completely unrelated event?”

And since the Pilgrims didn’t believe in Christmas, Talbot pointed out they couldn’t even stick fancy fruit above the doors of the Pilgrim Village as they do in Williamsburg.

Old Colony Club

“We think what they did was worth doing and worth remembering too,” wrote Talbot. “We look at the cold waters of the harbor on Forefathers Day and think of them in an open boat heading toward land. It’s worth the effort to get together with others who care about the Pilgrims.”

Today the Old Colony Club still meets Fridays in a colonial building in Plymouth, and members play an archaic game of cards called Bestia.

* * *

Need some new ideas for your Thanksgiving feast? How about trying something old — and authentic — from the New England Historical Society’s latest ebook. Available from Amazon (click here).

This story was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed reading it, you may also read about colonial holidays we no longer celebrate here. Image of the Old Colony Club By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67651602.

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Little Italy in New England: Some Lost, Some Thriving

Shortly after the American Civil War, a new kind of neighborhood emerged in New England cities: a Little Italy. They were poor, dense, Roman Catholic and very, very family oriented.

The Italians came to escape grinding poverty in Sicily and Southern Italy. They followed the Irish, who came to escape the potato famine and usually moved out when the Italians moved in.

Today, the descendants of Italian immigrants make up more than 10 percent of the population of every New England state except Vermont and Maine. A Little Italy survives in Boston, in New Haven and in Providence, but bulldozers took out the Little Italies of Northern New England to make way for hotels and parking lots.

People flock to the surviving Little Italies for their buoyant street atmospheres, their summer religious festivals and most of all for their food.

Here, then, are six of New England’s Little Italies, both lost and surviving.

Wooster Square

Welcome to New Haven’s Little Italy, Wooster Square

Connecticut is the second most Italian state in the United States, with 18.7 percent of the population claiming Italian ancestry. So you shouldn’t be surprised that roughly half the populations of three New Haven neighborhoods — East Haven, West Haven, and North Haven — are descended from Italian immigrants.

Wooster Square is New Haven’s Little Italy, one of the densest and oldest in the country. It has plenty of Italian pastry shops and restaurants, like Tony & Lucille’s, Da Legna and Consiglio’s. Locals argue about which is better: Frank Pepe’s white clam apizza or Sally’s.

Frank Pepe’s exterior.

The neighborhood was named after Revolutionary War General David Wooster because he owned a warehouse near Water Street. Before the harbor was filled, Wooster Square was close to the waterfront. Ship captains and wholesale grocers built large houses near the port. By the end of the 19th century, factories moved to Wooster Square, making it a less desirable place to live.

Sargent Manufacturing, a hardware maker, moved in to New Haven and brought workers from the Amalfi coast of Italy. More Italians followed, to make corsets at Strouse, Adler, boots at Candee Rubber Co., clocks at the New Haven Clock Company and carriage parts at C. Cowles and other carriage factories. Many families opened small shops out of their homes.

The neighborhood fell into poverty when factories closed during the Great Depression. The city planned to build a highway through Wooster Square during the 1950s and ‘60s, but preservationists rallied. Wooster Square was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.

For 117 years, the Society of St. Andrew has held a festa at the end of June to honor St. Andrew, who saved Amalfi from Turkish invaders.

Portland’s Lost Little Italy

Maine is one of the least Italian states in New England (along with Vermont), but nonetheless 50,000 Italian-Americans live within its borders. They began arriving in large numbers around 1900 and moved to Portland’s Little Italy on India Street. They came to work in Portland as barbers, carpenters, fishermen, longshoremen, railroad workers and masons.

St. Peter’s Parish

Life for Italian immigrants centered on St. Peter’s Parish on Federal Street, built in 1929. Eventually Portland’s Italian-Americans moved to the suburbs, and Portland’s Little Italy is nearly gone. St. Peter’s Parish is still active, and Micucci Grocery Co., Est. 1949., is still open on India Street. Amato’s Italian delicatessen, now a chain, still claims to have originated the Italian sandwich.

The North End of Boston

Boston’s North End

People have lived in Boston’s North End since 1630. Paul Revere lived there in a house built on the site of Increase Mather’s house. The Old North Church still stands; Paul Revere saw lanterns hung from its steeple. Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, lived in a North End mansion before patriots ransacked it in 1765.

By the late 1840s, the North End developed a red light district and prosperous residents moved away. Irish immigrants moved in to the neighborhood, and moved up in the world. Boston Mayor John ‘Honey Fitz’ Fitzgerald and his daughter Rose lived there.

Ann Street in Boston’s North End, 1881

By the time Rose married Joe Kennedy and moved to Brookline, Eastern European Jews started moving in. Then came many, many Italians. At one time 44,000 Italians lived in the North End, more than three times the number of Irish at their peak — 14,000, and more than the 17,000 Jews.

Churches, Feasts, Processions

The Italians took over five Protestant churches and built new Catholic ones, including St. Leonard’s, the first Italian-speaking church in New England. They started the first Italian café, Café Vittoria, in 1929. They ran grocery stores and bakeries. Three Italian immigrants started the Prince pasta company on Prince Street, and the Pastene Corporation started in a North End pushcart.

The North End became the center of world attention during the trial and execution in 1927 of Sacco and Vanzetti. The Patriarca crime family operated out of the North End for a time. So did Charles Ponzi.

Today the narrow dense streets are lined with cafes, pizzerias, small grocery stores and dozens of Italian restaurants, popular among tourists and city dwellers alike. The North End’s religious societies sponsor a dozen feasts and processions during the year. Mass is celebrated, food is served and religious statues covered with dollar bills are paraded through the streets.

The North End of Portsmouth

Daniel Webster’s house. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Portsmouth, N.H., once had a Little Italy that was a tiny version of Boston’s Little Italy. There were 300 homes in 30 acres for about a thousand people. And, as in Boston, Portsmouth’s Little Italy was called the North End.

And if Paul Revere lived in Boston’s North End, Daniel Webster lived in Portsmouth’s.

It was a crowded waterfront neighborhood with narrow, busy streets and dozens of small businesses, restaurants and shops. Families sold beer and lobster rolls from their homes, popcorn and ice cream from pushcarts.

First it was a colonial neighborhood, then Irish. The Irish moved out when a wave of Italians arrived at the beginning of the 20^th century. They worked in the shoe and button factories. Or they worked in the construction trades and later at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard.

By 1920, Portsmouth’s Little Italy was 95 percent Italian. There were also Chinese, French, Irish, African-Americans, Russians, Jewish, Polish, Canadians, Greeks, Indians. Some people viewed the neighborhood as a slum.

Urban renewal in the 1950s and ’60s leveled many of the homes, replacing them with a municipal parking lot, the Sheraton Hotel and the old Portsmouth Herald Building. Daniel Webster’s home and the Farragut School next door became an A&P and a parking lot, then a hotel. Only a few of the old buildings survive.

Federal Hill

Providence’s Little Italy.

You can still hear Italian spoken in Providence’s Little Italy, known as Federal Hill. The neighborhood followed the typical trajectory of a Little Italy: A colonial neighborhood became a commercial district. Then Irish immigrants filled its tenements during the famines of the mid-19^th century. The Italians began to arrive in the 1870s.

Today Rhode Island is the most Italian state in the country, just ahead of Connecticut, and the Little Italy of Providence is alive and well.

The arch that welcomes people to Providence’s Little Italy on Federal Hill.

The gateway arch that welcomes visitors to Federal Hill is one of the most recognizable Providence landmarks. The neighborhood includes the Columbus Theater, college housing, a piazza, Italian specialty shops and bakeries and Roman Catholic churches.

Italian flags decorate the main thoroughfare, Atwells Avenue. The Columbus Day parade starts on Federal Hill in the middle of the three-day Columbus Day Festival. On March 19, St. Joseph’s Day, Federal Hill’s Italian bakeries churn out a pastry called zeppole.

More than 20 Italian restaurants such as Angelo’s Civita Farnese and Café Mediterraneo line a quarter-mile of Atwells Avenue. They attract skilled chefs because they’re so near Johnson and Wales University.

In 1954, mob kingpin Ray Patriarca moved from Boston’s North End to the National Cigarette Service Company and Coin-O-Matic Distributors on Atwells Avenue. He died of a heart attack in 1984.

Little Italy, Burlington

The Little Italy in Burlington, Vt., mirrors the history of Portsmouth’s North End. Italians arrived at the turn of the 19th century to work in lumber mills and railroad yards. They created a vibrant little neighborhood along the waterfront east of Battery Street.

Burlington’s Little Italy had 140 homes, social clubs, Catholic schools and churches and small businesses like Izzo’s Market, Merola’s and Bellino’s Grocery.

Outsiders thought they could improve Burlington’s Little Italy with urban renewal. In 1966, the final house was razed to make way for the Champlain Street Project. More than 200 people were scattered after the city bought their houses at unfairly low prices. The old neighborhood fell to parking garages and lots, concrete-and-glass office buildings, a hotel and a windowless shopping mall.

Today three interpretive signs are all that’s left of Burlington’s Little Italy. It is fondly remembered as a place where neighbors shared homemade wine and children ran in and out of their neighbors’ houses, which were never locked.

Images: Gateway Arch over Atwells Avenue, By Zigamorph – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0 us, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3996788; Atwells Avenue by Jef Nickerson, Flickr; Boston North End By Ingfbruno – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27355267; Frank Pepe’s By Krista – frank pepe exterior, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38640336.

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12 Fascinating Facts About Independence Day

Independence Day from the get-go has been a rowdy holiday with ringing bells, gunfire, cannon fire, fireworks, feasting, speeches and toasts.

Over the years, people tried to turn it into something else: a platform for temperance speeches, a chance for immigrants to express their ‘American-ness,’ a ‘safe-and-sane’ holiday. But it always seems to revert to a rowdy celebration.

Here then, is a list of 12 fascinating facts about the Independence Day.

1. Adams Messed Up

It didn’t really happen this way. Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull.

John Adams got the date wrong. In a letter to his wife Abigail from Philadelphia on July 3, 1776, he wrote, “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.” You can understand his mistake, since the Continental Congress approved independence on July 2. And all the signers of the Declaration of Independence didn’t exactly gather around the parchment and sign at once. Some had left Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. Moreover, the Declaration didn’t get printed with all the names of the signers until January 1777, by Mary Katherine Goddard in Baltimore.

2. A Looong Independence Day Tradition

Boston fireworks, 2011.

Fireworks go all the way back to 1777, when Boston and Philadelphia held the first displays. The Continental Congress authorized the fireworks in Philadelphia. And in Boston, “Col. Crafts illuminated his park on the commons, threw several shells, and exhibited a number of fireworks.”

3. Quite a Streak

Charles Francis Adams

The Adams family participated in official Independence Day celebrations for 116 consecutive years. It started from the time John signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and ended in 1892, when Charles Francis Adams, Jr., gave a speech at the First Church in Quincy, Mass.

4. Independence Day Toasts

George Washington by Gilbert Stuart

During the 19th century, people loved to drink patriotic toasts on the Independence celebrations. Tipplers carefully prepared the toasts and often published them in the local newspaper. They frequently toasted George Washington. For example, a toast from Lexington, Mass., in 1814, went like this: “The memory of Washington. May his name no more be profaned by Hypocrites, as that of Jesus has been by the Jesuits.”

5. Independence Day Time Capsule

Massachusetts State House from the Boston Common

On the Fourth of July in 1795, Paul Revere and Gov. Sam Adams laid the cornerstone for the Massachusetts State House in Boston. They also buried a copper time capsule. It contained a pine tree shilling coin from 1652, a copper medal engraved with an image of George Washington, several newspapers and a silver plate thought to be engraved by Paul Revere. State officials opened the time capsule in 2014.

6. Career Launch

Young Daniel Webster

On the Fourth of July 1800, Daniel Webster launched his political career as an 18-year-old Dartmouth junior. He was chosen to deliver a speech at the college because of his reputation as a speaker and debater. In the speech he praised the veterans of the Revolution, George Washington and the unifying authority of the U.S. Constitution.

7. Coincidence?

Thomas Jefferson

John Adams died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. His last words were “Jefferson still survives.” He got it wrong; Jefferson died five hours earlier. Only one signer of the Declaration still lived in 1826: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, Md., who died six years later at the age of 95.

8. Playing with Fire

Aftermath of the Great Portland Fire.

A Fourth of July firecracker in 1866 started the Great Portland Fire in Maine. The conflagration, the worst to date in the United States, burned 1800 buildings. It left 10,000 homeless and killed two. Fireworks, though, didn’t cause as many Fourth of July fatalities as toy guns. The toy bullets — blank cartridges, actually — pierced the skin and caused tetanus, the leading cause of Independence Day deaths in the 19th century.

Henry Ward Beecher speaking at Woodstock, Conn, President Grant seated. From a Harper’s Weekly engraving courtesy Library of Congress.

9. Bor-ing

Starting in 1870, Henry C. Bowen, a businessman, hosted the country’s largest Fourth of July party in Woodstock, Conn., at his Roseland Cottage. The event featured many, many, many speeches; so many, that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes tried to get out of going in 1877. Bowen didn’t drink, and President Ulysses S. Grant had to sneak a cocktail on the porch at the first party in 1870.

The Boston Pops plays Stars and Stripes Forever.

10. Independence Day Pops

The Boston Pops Orchestra has played Stars and Stripes Forever at the end of its concerts since 1899, two years after John Philip Sousa composed it. Arthur Fiedler included it in the first Independence Day Pops concert on the Esplanade in 1929. The Pops has played it ever since, the flag always dropping in the final moments of the piece. As many as 500,000 people show up for the concert.

Americanization Day poster

11. Americanization Day

Future Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis kicked off the first Americanization Day with a Fourth of July speech in 1915 at Boston’s Faneuil Hall. Americanization Day, an attempt to crowd out Independence Day, responded to nearly two decades of increasing immigration, a sore spot for many Americans. The Americanization Day movement set about to reshape the day’s image around themes of immigrants embracing American culture. It didn’t last.

12. No White House Celebration

Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

The saddest Independence Day in the White House was probably in 1924, when President Calvin Coolidge spent most of the day at the bedside of his 16-year-old son. Calvin Coolidge, Jr., had developed septic poisoning after he played tennis without socks and it caused a blister that got infected. He died on July 7.

With thanks to James R. Heintze’s Fourth of July Celebrations Database. Boston Fireworks image By Pablo Valerio – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15723763. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Largest Historic District in Each New England State

Identifying the largest historic districts in New England was no easy task because, let’s face it, we’re dripping with history. You can barely throw a rock in New England without hitting a historic building, landscape, cemetery, lighthouse or waterfront.

Since we decided to do it by state, we found Rhode Island especially challenging because of Providence and Newport. Both cities have extensive collections of historic buildings. We opted for Ocean Drive in Newport, as it contains 1,509 acres.

So if you have a yen for taking in a lot of history some weekend day, these might fit the bill.

Wethersfield Historic District

six largest historic districts wethersfield

Wethersfield Historic District

English settlers from Massachusetts founded Wethersfield in 1634, making it the first European settlement in Connecticut. The historic district, tucked between Hartford and Rocky Hill, covers 1,300 acres. It contains 1,200 buildings with about 100 dating to colonial times.

The town itself evolved from a struggling early colonial outpost. It then emerged as a transportation hub and contributed many soldiers to the American Revolution. Then eventually it rose to prominence as home to the Wethersfield onion.

Work on officially protecting the historic district began in 1962. In 1970, the National Park Service placed it on the National Register of Historic Places. The district has many residents and businesses, making for a lively ambience. Most famously it also contains the Silas Deane House (1766), the Joseph Webb House (1752); and the Isaac Stevens house (1790). They belong to the Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum. open to the public. So is the Town Green, which stretches nearly a half mile.

Joseph Webb and Isaac Stevens houses

Colonial and Federal style houses surround the green, and many retain their original character. They offer excellent examples of the carpentry used by skilled builders who mostly worked as shipbuilders.

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village

Maine, the largest state in New England, naturally has several large historic districts. The Schoodic Historic District in Acadia National Park takes in more than 1,000 acres of raw natural seascapes. The Castine Historic District, with its rich colonial history, takes up about 1,800 acres on the southern end of the Bagaduce Peninsula. Meanwhile, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, near Poland and New Gloucester, sits on somewhere between 1,700 and 1,900 acres of land.

Founded between 1782 and 1784, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village was a settlement of Shakers – a religious group that grew out of the Quaker, Methodist and Camisard sects of Protestantism.

Shakers lived communally, worked hard and practiced celibacy. That ultimately spelled the dwindling of the Shakers. Sabbathday Lake was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1974.

Despite the shrinking population of Shakers, Sabbathday Lake remains a working Shaker Village. It has 18 buildings, and six are open to the public. The museum welcomes summer visitors to view Shaker crafts and learn about the history of the group. Tours of the village are offered Monday through Saturday throughout the summer. The village is closed on Sunday, though the public may attend a weekly religious service.

Nantucket Island

The Oldest House

All 30,000 acres of Nantucket belong to the National Historic Landmark District. The island is considered the finest surviving example of a late 18th-century New England seaport town. America’s whaling industry started on Nantucket in the late 17th century, as the colonists imitated the original Native American whalers.

The Old Mill

By 1774, 250 American ships engaged in whaling; 150 of them came from Nantucket. But then whaling declined. Shifting sandbars also prevented ships from entering Nantucket Harbor, and a fire in 1846 destroyed the business section.

Historic preservation didn’t begin on the island until 1897. Then someone donated a windmill built in 1746 was donated to the Nantucket Historical Association. Eight hundred structures built before the Civil War survive, including Sankaty Light, built in 1850.

Another historic property, the Jethro Coffin House, dates to 1686. But as Nantucket prospered, residents built larger houses in the Federal and Greek Revival styles. Orange and Main streets offer the best examples of those grand old homes.

R.H. Macy ran a dry goods store on Main and Fair streets, today commemorated by a plaque. Nearby is the Pacific National Bank, where on the roof Maria Mitchell discovered a comet.

The island’s fortunes changed with the arrival of wealthy summer visitors. Some put the island on the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s most endangered list in 2000. That’s because they tore down houses, gutted rehabs and built too-large homes on inappropriate sites.

Amherst Village District

Amherst, N.H., was named for Lord Jeffery Amherst, commander of all British forces in North America. The town then became the first Hillsborough County seat in 1769, but county government moved to either Nashua or Manchester. That left the central village barely touched by change, and today it’s one of the prettiest places in New England.

In Amherst, Horace Greeley was born, Franklin Pierce got married and Daniel Webster argued cases.

Today the Amherst Historic District comprises more than 1600 acres and 120 buildings. They come in Federal, Georgian and Greek Revival styles. They’re clustered around the Village Green. There the town holds a large old-fashioned Fourth of July celebration. In winter, there’s a Christmas tree lighting and, throughout the summer, band concerts.

Ocean Drive Historic District

The view from Ocean Drive

The Ocean Drive Historic District developed when the new grand mansions on Bellevue Avenue pushed development south. Ocean Drive begins near Bellevue Avenue, follows the shoreline to Brenton Point State Park and then ends just south of Fort Adams.

The roadway winds through rolling green hills, rocky cliffs, pastures and summer houses. Those include early 18th-century farms and Eidlitz’s Swiss Chalet of 1854. Frederick Law Olmsted designed some of the landscape.

The homes are much more private than on Bellevue Avenue. But they include some architectural gems: the neoclassical Beacon Rock estate by McKim, Mead and White. There’s also a stunning French chateaux by Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson and Bonniecrest and a Tudor English mansion converted to condos. Hammersmith Farm, where Sen. John F. Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier, is also along Ocean Drive.

Commercial buildings are generally the clubhouses of private beaches. Gooseberry Beach is private but open to the public.

Montpelier Historic District

State Street, Montpelier Historic District

Montpelier, Vt., has the largest historic district in Vermont listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The city, Vermont’s state capital, grew up around government, But it also got help from industry powered by water from the Winooski River and its North Branch.

Montpelier has Federal style mansions and Greek Revival homes that survived the town’s economic boom after the Civil War. In fact, the historic district has 563 main properties along with bridges, dams and cemeteries. The city also has vibrant neighborhoods and busy downtown and business districts. It proves history doesn’t have to be boring. (We never thought so, though.)

Vermont Statehouse

The district has five churches designed by architects between 1865 and 1874. It also includes Italianate mansions and brick commercial buildings built after two fires in 1875. From the 19th and 20th centuries, the district has elaborate French Second Empire and Queen Anne homes as well as buildings deemed historically important. The Greek Revival Statehouse was carefully restored in the 1980s.

The Vermont History Museum, next to the Statehouse, has maps of the historic district.

Images: Sabbathday Lake By Jamie Ribisi-Braley – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=35399926. Montpelier By AlexiusHoratius – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23102071. Vermont Statehouse By Jonathanking – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21731245. Amherst Civil War monument By Smuttynoser at the English language Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10372554. And Ocean Drive, By Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3966356.

This story about the largest historic districts updated in 2022.

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